Saturday, May 23, 2015

Whether you realize it or not, names are a part of language,
and a by no means unimportant one. I am not even referring to such a somewhat
esoteric phenomenon as a proper noun becoming a common one—e.g., Sandwich,
Mackintosh, Wellington boots—but to proper names improperly used and a threat
to correct usage.

Consider the shocker when a prize-winning racehorse bears
the misspelled name American Pharoah. Pharoah, alas, is a fairly common
misspelling of pharaoh, but it does not usually get this kind of publicity and
fame. The Times of May 23 has an article, “American Pharoah’s Misspelling
Mystery,” that sheds light on the matter.

You cannot, of course, blame the horse itself, which,
however much horse sense it may possess, does not know with what moniker it has
been blessed or cursed. Its chief owner is a rich Egyptian, Ahmad Zayat, owner
of Zayat Stables, and you would expect an Egyptian, of all people, to know how
to spell pharaoh. But oh no. To be sure, I wonder how many Americans can spell
Roosevelt correctly.

Still, no matter what Ahmed Zayat may or may not know,
surely there ought to have been a decent speller in his stable—his son, Justin,
perhaps. It turns out, however, that not even the Jockey Club took steps to
rectify the error. As James L. Gagliano, the Club’s president and CEO put it,
“Since the name met all of the criteria for naming and was available, it was
granted exactly as it was spelled.”

It now emerges that the Zayat Stables hold an online contest
for the naming of their horses, and thus there was the invitation to the public
in 2014 to name their crop of two-year-olds. And who won the contest for naming
this future champion? It’s all there in the Times: Marsha Baumgartner, of
Barnett, Mo., depicted in the paper with her husband, Dave, and described as “a
64-year-old registered nurse in a tiny central Missouri town.”

Unfortunately, though there is a register for nurses, there
is none for illiterates. If you inspect the picture, you will find two typical
unglamorous Midwesterners of the small-town variety, she even, as one suspects
from her chubby cheeks, overweight, but when it comes to learning and
refinement, clearly lightweight.

When asked, she commented: “I don’t remember how I spelled
it; I don’t want to assign blame. I looked up the spelling before I entered.”
That she won’t assign blame is understandable, given on whom it would fall. It
also figures that she doesn’t remember how she spelled it, since she managed to
forget the spelling in the comparatively short time between looking it up and
sending it out.

There is also the question of where, if she isn’t fibbing,
she did that looking up. Does she own a reputable dictionary? Or did she find
the word in some other worthy publication, say the Sears catalogue or the Farmer’s
Almanac. “Pharaoh,” I suspect, is one of the most misspelled words in America,
whether the perpetrators are from the ranks of born-again Christians or college
students.

What I find somewhat more surprising is discovering that the
Jockey Club found the name within the rules, “which include an 18-character
limit (Pioneerof the Nile was rendered that way to conform to the guidelines)
and a ban on obscene or offensive phrases.” Personally, I consider “pharoah”
not just offensive, but actually nothing less than obscene. And, speaking of
“less,” Melissa Hoppert, author of the Times article, states that up to six
names per horse can be submitted, although “the average is two or less.” Though
“fewer” would be correct here, even that seems problematic where “one or two”
would be more natural.

T. S. Eliot has written compellingly about the naming of
cats, and thus influenced the nomenclature of the musical of that name. Nobody
has weighed in on the naming of horses, which strikes me as bizarre in the
extreme. But then again, no more so than the naming of some people.

Consider if you will the name of a promising black tennis
player, a young man named Frances Tiefoe. Yes, Frances, not Francis. Now
whatever may have prompted the parents to give their son a girl’s name—ignorance
being the most charitable interpretation—you would think that he himself, with
or without friendly advice, would see fit to have his name legally
transgendered.

Well, some tennis players do have odd names: no fewer than
two women—one white, one black—are called Madison (Keys and Brengle), and one
can’t help wondering whether it is derived from a president or an avenue. But a
male Frances is unique.

Why does any of this matter? Because where famous persons or
equines are concerned, such misguidedness becomes influential and widespread.
And the instigators don’t even need to be famous. I doubt whether the first
person who mispronounced “grocery” as “groshery” was a celebrity, yet behold
the result.

Egypt, for example, is an unlikely culprit. But look: not
only Pharoah, but also Pioneerof the Nile. Does it have to be an Egyptian river?
Were there no pioneers of the Amazon? Never mind, though. Misnomers will always
be among us, only let it not be on account of a prominent horse or sportsman.
Granted Tiefoe is not yet celebrated, but he could well become so. And then
what might be the names of his future male colleagues: Mary, Josephine, or,
tomorrow, Tamara?

Saturday, May 2, 2015

With Gunter Grass, who just died at age 87, I had a brief
friendship. I translated for him on a popular radio show, and I introduced him
at his reading at the Y. I also met his charming first wife, Anna, a Swiss
dancer, and acquiesced in his friendly cavil: why must I everywhere find some
fault, i.e., be hypercritical (though not of him). Our ways parted amicably,
and there was no further contact. Incidentally: can a critic be hypercritical?
An architect, hyperarchitectural? An ophthalmologist, hyperocular?

He was a major writer. Though of interest in his early poems
and later plays, and of real charm in his drawings (I never saw his
sculptures), it was with two of his early novels, “The Tin Drum” and “Dog
Years,” that he achieved international stature: two novels of lasting luster,
both of which I reviewed with due enthusiasm. Later, even as good a novel as
“The Flounder” seemed a bit overlong: too many over-drawn-out parts among the
indisputably brilliant ones.

He did also publish his political writings, many of them
stomping speeches for Willy Brandt, but political writings tend to be primarily
of specific, temporary interest, and only secondarily transcending into
universality, into permanence.

Especially remarkable in his later years was his outing of
himself. That he had been a member of the Hitler Youth can be readily excused,
comparable to our youthful joining of the Boy Scouts. But subsequent time in
the Waffen-SS was less innocuous, even if, as the Times obituary pointed out,
it was “near the end of the war, and [he] was never accused of atrocities,[though] the fact that he had obscured
the crucial point of his background while flagellating his fellow Germans for
cowardice set off cries of outrage.”

There was something likable even in Grass’s appearance. It
is nice when an artist makes no attempt to look like one, avoiding the aura of
regimentation of even that harmless bohemian kind. Grass was of medium stature,
rather stocky, and with a walrus mustache more befitting a German general or
emperor. That, and a certain glint in his gaze, gave him the aspect of a canny
peasant whose wit had let him ascend to the ranks of the solid bourgeoisie,
which in Germany has a way of looking even more bourgeois than its equivalent
in other countries. He rather reminded me of the successful upstart Lopakhin in
Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard.”

No other major novelist since Rabelais has, to my knowledge,
made as much of eating—indeed gourmandising—as Gunter Grass has. And not only
eating, but also cooking. He was himself a pretty good cook. Consider the
following, from the memoirs of Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Germany’s preeminent
literary critic. Not especially fond of Grass’s writing, R-R nevertheless
accepted a dinner invitation from Grass: “He would, with his own hand, prepare
a meal for us [R-R and his wife, Tosia]. I accepted despite my memory of a soup
made by Grass, which I had recklessly eaten in the summer of 1965, on the
occasion of the wedding of . . . Walter Hoellerer . . . . It had tasted
disgusting. I expected the worst. But then a critic must have courage. . . . He
served us fish. Now I hate and fear fishbones. And I did not realize that there
existed any fish with quite so many bones. . . . Anyway, it was both a torture
and a delight. Undistinguished as he may have been as a producer of soup, he
was magnificent with fish. The meal was risky but tasty—and it had no ill
effects whatsoever either for Tosia or myself. Yet it had some consequences.
What was left of the fish, mainly its numerous bones, was sketched by grass the
following day. And very soon this fish was at the center of a novel by him. It
was a flounder.”

I would guess that having a grocer father was that much more
likely to produce an esurient son. And so we have cooks popping up everywhere
in his writings, most notably in the play, “The Evil Cooks.” But also in “The
Flounder,” where we get a wonderful of nine (or eleven) noteworthy female cooks
through the ages, some real some
fictitious. Hence the “or eleven.” As the critic Peter Demetz put it, Grass
“initially intended to write a prose epic about the primary role of food in
world history, but that at a later stage, coming to grips with an irrepressible
crew of formidable women—some fictional, some real—who did the world’s
important cooking, he confronted recent feminist ideas about women in culture
at large. “The Flounder” is an ample, exuberant, and skillfully structured
narrative about eating, cooking, procreating, women and a cunning fish . . .”

The book contains among other things, as Patrick O’Neill has
written, “a generous selection of recipes for outlandish dishes,” but all sorts
of details deal indirectly with food. In reviewing “The Flounder,” John Updike
has written, “when at the end [Ilsebill]’s husband/narrator, watching her
undergo a Caesarian operation, notes that ‘I also saw how yellow, like duck
fat, Ilsebill’s belly fat is. A piece of it crumbled off and I could have fried
two eggs on it,’ his tortuously ramifying theme of food is brought to a point
that hurts.” This passage exemplifies Grass’s important use of the grotesque,
and the way he so often manages to use springboards leaping back to food or
cooking.”

Of equal importance is that he is writing fables, i.e.,
books in which there is an element of the fabulous. And fables almost always
feature symbolic animals. Observe only his titles, in which cat, mouse, dog,
toad, female rat, flounder, and snail make their appearances, even if the mouse
is only a hypertrophic Adam’s apple, and the toad only a voice. These animals live; the flounder
talks, the snail keeps a diary.

Eventually Grass got what was long prophesied for him, the
Nobel Prize, although by that time most of his books were also seriously
questioned and even, as in the case of “My Century,” poorly reviewed. Nor did
it matter that he reused some of his subjects, as, for instance, the grinding
poverty of Calcutta appearing in both his fiction and nonfiction.

My own notice of “The Tin Drum” for Partisan Review and
reprinted in my collection “The Sheep from the Goats,” as well as being the
lead essay in Patrick O’Neill’s anthology “Critical Essays on Gunter Grass,”
satisfies me upon rereading, as not all of my earlier writings do, though some
amaze me with their prescience. I recognized in Grass what Salman Rushdie did
in his introduction to “On Writing and Politics, 1967-1983.” He spoke of “books
which give [writers] permission to travel . . . become the sort of writers they
have it in themselves to be. A passport is a kind of book.” And, inversely, a
book can be a kind of passport.

It has been pointed out that Grass was a precursor of the
“magic realism” that came to us much later from writers in South America. As
Rushdie observes, what the wildest fantasy leads to may seem on one level
absurd, but is hopeful underneath. And thus liberating.

P.S.: I regret not having the umlaut for the U in Gunter.
The customary substitute, an added E as in Guenter, seemed to me awkward and
alienating.

About Me

I've written for over 50 years on theatre, film, literature, music and fine arts for the Hudson Review, New Leader, New Criterion, National Review, New York magazine, Opera News, Weekly Standard, Broadway.com, Bloomberg News, The Westchester Guardian and on the Yonkers Tribune website. I'm continuing my contributions to the New York Times Book Review, Weekly Standard and New Criterion. Recently I've been seen on Heat Street. I have a PhD from Harvard University in Comparative Literature.